Crank shaft

This week, I’ve been so angry at the world that it has been difficult to write sentences. I wish I didn’t love this world so much, sometimes. I wish it were easier to give you up, world. You are the worst relationship I’ve ever had.

I choose Pluto, man. It’s even more appealing because it’s far off, and tiny.

I’ve been reading a 650-page biography of Jane Goodall. She had a lot of good luck, and weathered a tremendous amount of sexual harassment — particularly by her mentors — and she talks about both her luck and her difficulties with such delight. She talks about the facts of them. They were just things that happened. She was lucky. She struggled. She worked hard. And she has never reconciled herself to her own charisma.

How is this relevant? It’s relevant because my trouble is focus. If I’m willing to see the ways we fail as humans, I most certainly will find ample evidence of failure. If I want to hate my neighbor, I can develop some reasons to do it. But why would I want to hate my neighbor? How is that different from hating myself?

Today, walking to work, the wind lashed in a spiral around me, and I was two streets away when I saw four people rush to an elderly man who’d fallen in the street. And then six men came running out of an office building and two women with a dog sprinted around the corner. A woman knelt beside him, her hand on his shoulder, talking to him. Another man called for assistance. There was so much love. It seemed to come from every direction.

The old man was on his knees like a supplicant. And I felt like that too, like a supplicant, blocks away from the drama, and somehow inside and outside it. Like those dreams where you’re a balloon, hovering over yourself. A thought-bubble of perspective for your own life.

Please. Please. Don’t keep kicking me in the heart, world. I’m so tired of loving you. I’m so tired of the kelly green on the yard in March, the chime of the bell in the spiral wind, the way the cyclists race up and down the street as though they can outpace you. I’m so tired of your terrible beauty. See? Even I don’t believe me anymore.